“Who is this Sophia Endering?” said Richard Storm suddenly.
“Shh!” said Harper Albright.
Storm forced a stage whisper: “I was just wondering. Do you know her at all?”
Harper didn’t answer, didn’t even look at him. So he was still thinking about her, she reflected—and it was almost two weeks since Bolt’s party; it was practically the end of December now.
The two of them were standing alone together in a Devon churchyard. At midnight, of course, because that was when the beast was said to prowl. A stabbing, slushy snow had already covered the bracken to the base of the headstones. Worse, it had made a shapeless white mass of the venison sirloin they had placed on top of the churchyard wall: their bait.
Harper herself, this odd little woman, had collected a fair half-inch of ice on both the brim of her Borsalino and the shoulders of her cloak. Leaning staunchly on her stick, she could feel the cloak’s gray wool growing heavy as the melt soaked through. She could feel her old flesh growing clammy as the chill began to reach it. And there was no lull in the bitterly thick wind either. It rode to her continuous over hedge and hill. It reached her with a straining, dying note that made her recollect the pixies of the Dart. They were said to have lured a farmboy to his death in the river by crying his name: Jan Coo! Jan Coo! She could almost hear them now in the crying of the wind.
Comes the hour, she thought irritably, but not the thing.
And yet, cold as she was, cranky as she was, she was still able to stand through the long surveillance stock-still, so still she might have been one of the graveyard’s more eccentric monuments—had it not been for her eyes, ferociously quick behind her spectacles’ thick lenses.
Storm, on the other hand, was bouncing around like a bottle on the ocean waves. Like a neon-orange bottle: he was dressed in some fantastic downy concoction, some bloated anorak from Ski-Meisters Of Hollywood or someplace, with triangles of bright green and purple scattered chaotically across the front of it. What he really looked like, Harper thought, was a deflated weather balloon. But he had the cameras ready, one hanging in each armpit, both wrapped in blue plastic bags, and their black straps crisscrossing his chest like gun belts. With any luck, the next issue of Bizarre! would feature the monster on its cover.
Storm whapped his shoulders with his hands, puffed his scarlet cheeks under his woolly watch cap, kept hopping up and down, up and down to stay warm in the driving snow.
“For pity’s sake,” Harper muttered. Even her lips were motionless when she spoke.
“Wh-wh-what?” said Storm.
Harper gave another grumpy huff or two. But then she relented. “All right. All right. I know her. I know about her, at any rate,” she said softly.
“Sophia? This Endering girl, I mean?”
“I know quite a lot about her, in fact. Does she interest you, young Richard?”
“Me? Nah. She just popped into my mind.” He managed to chop the words out between his chattering teeth. “While we were standing here. I was thinking. That’s all. Really.”
Harper let the lie pass. Her eyes made a slow half-circuit of the scene before her. The toppled steles, the ice-fringed tombs, the castellated tower of the church itself, lopped and moldering at the fringes of the visible. Beyond the graveyard’s low stone wall, the snow obliterated her view of the surrounding moor.
“Her grandfather was in trade, as I understand,” she said in her gravelly rasp.
“Her grandfather?”
“You wanted to know about her.”
“Right, right. Her grandfather. So he was in trade, huh?”
“An antiques dealer. In Surrey, I believe. In a way, it’s quite a romantic story. When his son, Michael Endering, fell in love with an archdeacon’s daughter, her parents thought him not quite the thing. They forbade the match, and the girl—Ann—was sent off to school in Switzerland. Five years later, however, Michael applied for her hand again. And by then he had become a millionaire many times over.”
“What, in five years?” said Storm, chattering, bouncing.
“Yes, and the money did the trick, apparently. He got the girl, her ancestral manse—Belham Grange—a knighthood eventually, plus the blessing and acceptance of an all-forgiving aristocracy. So far as I know, the rumors concerning the Nazis were never even mentioned.”
That stopped Storm bopping about, at any rate. He stood flat-footed, panting. Dragged a neon-orange cuff across his dripping nose. “The Nazis? You mean, like, the Nazi Nazis? The evil German guys from World War II?”
“The very ones.” She turned her head, faced him—and she’d stood so rigid till then under her gray mantle that it really did give the impression of a statue coming to life. “They had plundered much of the art of Europe, you’ll remember, slaughtering many of its rightful owners along the way. Sometime after the war, the stolen masterpieces flooded the black market. England’s strict laws concerning ownership made the trade dangerous and difficult here …”
“So you’re saying Sophia’s father was a fence for Nazi loot.”
“I’m saying there were rumors to that effect—largely discounted then, and long forgotten now. He married Ann, set up his art gallery in New Bond Street, moved into Belham Grange, and had three children, Sophia being the youngest. His life after that was without any tinge of public scandal. That is, until nineteen years ago, when Ann hanged herself.”
Storm’s mouth opened. White balls of mist spilled from his lips, whipped away on the howling wind. “She hanged herself?”
“Fortunately, all the children were in London with their grandparents when it happened. Sophia was five at the time.”
“Jeez. Nazis and suicide,” Storm said.
“Precisely,” said Harper.
A long moment passed. The old woman examined her companion closely. “Young Richard,” she said. “If you are planning to approach Miss Endering—”
“No, no, I’m not,” he answered at once.
“But if you are, you should know—”
“I’m telling you, it’s nothing like that, Harper. I’m not approaching her. I’m not going anywhere near her. Not anywhere. Believe me.” He met her gaze almost fiercely, his expression uncharacteristically hard and taut. “I didn’t come here for that,” he told her.
Behind the dripping lenses of her spectacles, Harper’s quick eyes narrowed. She held him then with such a slow, gimlet scrutiny that Storm at last averted his face from her. He frowned miserably into the blizzard.
But when Harper spoke again, her tone had softened. She had long since satisfied herself that there was nothing malevolent in the man. Indeed—she was forced to admit it now—she was developing a definite fondness for him. “All right,” she said, more gently. “Why did you come here, then?”
Fighting down a violent shiver, he made a clipped gesture before hugging himself tightly again: he was trying to indicate the vista of crumbling stones, the blizzard-whipped church, even the invisible moor around them. The usual—puzzling—melancholy of his eyes was plain to see. And his tone too, Harper thought, had become wistful. “I told you—it’s England. I’ve been making movies about this place my whole life. Places like this. I mean, look at it, the whole country, it’s a movie set, I swear.”
“Mm. Yes.” She followed his gesture with a thin smile. “Some of us rather prefer to think of it as a fortress built by Nature for herself against infection and the hand of war—but yes, a movie set, all right. And so?”
Storm still gazed visionary at the place, with those sad eyes of his. Gazed at a spot where a small elm bent and swayed in what seemed like mourning over the cornice of a decaying crypt. “So, to me, this is where the ghosts live.” He murmured it, almost to himself. The snow streaking his face with wet, his watch cap sodden, his anorak sodden, flattened, the puff gone out of it.
Even Harper now, statue that she was, had begun to feel the shivers rising from her depths. And still she stood, her wrinkled hand frozen to the dragon head of her stick, the stick planted in the gathering snow, the snow eating through her boots, through her cape, through her Borsalino. And still she stood motionless, watching the graveyard wall through her streaked lenses, watching the snowy mound that was the venison bait.
“I came here,” Storm said, “because I wanted to see—”
“Shh!”
He stopped. Harper had gone electric, tensed. The two of them listened, their faces tilted into the blizzard’s teeth. There seemed to be something … They listened, vying with the storm.
Yes. Suddenly, there it was. Borne to them on the wind, almost a part of the wind’s wail. Soft but piercing, a preternatural squall. More than one voice, it seemed. A chorus of voices. A chorus of tormented voices, of subterranean laments breaking free into the swirling air. Now, as they cocked their ears, it strengthened, became one high, screeching yowl, a single, tortured stridor. Rising, blooming, peaking. Then bursting, splintering again into that pitiful choir. It went on and on.
Now am I come where many a plaining voice smites on mine ear, thought Harper Albright, every muscle tight. There shrieks are heard, there lamentations, moans, and blasphemies …
And even Storm whispered, “Jeepers. It sounds like the damned.”
“Yes,” she replied aloud. “A very encouraging vocalization.”
And then it stopped. It faded into the wind until they couldn’t tell it from the wind. Until the wind cried alone, all around them, forlorn. Harper narrowed her eyes behind her streaming glasses, peered intently past crypt and statue, peered and peered at that lump of snow, that hunk of venison, on the wall.
“Do you think …?” Storm began to say.
And the creature took both of them completely by surprise.
There was no warning. A silent enormity of movement—a fluid leap, as of the night itself—and it was on the wall. Not where the venison was, not where they’d expected it. It was crouching, poised, to their left, not five yards away, just above their heads. Its carnivore eyes glittered down at them.
Storm threw himself in front of Harper, his arms spread to defend her. It was a lovely gesture. It warmed the cockles of her heart. But this was no time for warm cockles. She’d lifted her stick. Her right hand gripped the dragon head. Her left was wrapped round its shaft. She drew the two apart to reveal a flashing length of stainless blade.
“Never mind me,” she growled. “Take pictures!”
She rejoiced to see him go at it. All courage, steely as her sword. Moving at her command on the instant. Snapping the plastic bag from one camera, snapping open its case even as he pulled the strap loose over his shoulder.
Harper felt a moment’s anxiety. The cameras—all things mechanical—were as mysterious to her as the White Horse of Uffington. But Storm raised the device expertly, his hand shielding the lens,.
There was a flash. It caught the creature. And the creature snarled, glared lightning strokes of white death across the corner of the snowy graveyard, into the camera’s single eye.
Harper let fly with her double bark of a laugh: “Ha-ha! Oh, that’s our cover art, I think. Well done, well done. ‘So one tracks love, whose breath is deadlier …’ ” She had a weakness for quotation.
The beast shifted its panting bulk their way.
“Hoo, boy,” Storm breathed. But to Harper’s delight, he never wavered, never stopped clicking the shutter, setting off the flash. “What the hell is it?”
“Felis concolor, my boy,” she cheered, unrestrained. “Oregonensis, judging by its size and Bergmann’s Rule. The puma, the panther, the cougar—the catamount, I think you call it in your part of the world—which is its natural element, by the way, from Vancouver to Patagonia.”
“Swell,” said Storm. The thing growled down at him as the flash went off again. “So what’s it doing here?”
“I really couldn’t say. Probably trying to decide whether to devour the venison—or us.”
At which—as the camera flashed once more—the monstrous brown cat reared and snarled, fangs bared to the weather, one claw raised as if to swipe both humans from the face of the earth. It could do it too, they could see that. Even coiled as it was for a muscular spring, it was clearly a long and ponderous thing, and knew its business. It could cut them from the planet like cookies from dough. It would leave nothing but Harper- and Storm-shaped holes in the material of existence.
“Foof,” said Storm. “Any wisdom in running away here?”
“I shouldn’t think so. Of course, it does prefer a leap of ambush to the running chase.”
“Well, there you go …”
“But it can leap twelve meters.”
“Foof.”
“The question is,” Harper said, “can it scent the bait in all this weather?”
It could; it did. But it took its own sweet time about it. It stretched the moments to the breaking point. Feinting at the two of them with its claw again. Rearing, looking gigantically down. Only then, finally, leisurely, insolently, did it lengthen itself and arch, did it stride, with one baleful backward glance over one shimmering shoulder, along the top of the wall toward the venison. Storm followed its surefooted progress with his camera, Harper with her bright eyes and throaty chuckle. There was another second of enormous, flowing movement, another huge shift in the snow-lanced dark. As swiftly as that, the white mound on the far wall was ravaged, the venison was plundered—and the creature had leapt away into nothingness.
The camera dropped from Storm’s trembling fingers, fell to the limit of the strap around his neck and dangled down around his belly. Harper, her limbs loosening at last, pushed her dragon head and shaft together, sliding the tapered blade back into its oaken sheath. The call of the wind, the patter of the falling slush returned to them—it was as if the volume of the surrounding world had been shut off for the length of the confrontation.
Storm and Harper turned to each other, dazed.
“So,” said Harper after a long moment. “You were saying?”
“Huh?”
“You were saying you came to England because you wanted to see … To see what?”
Storm stared at her. Then he laughed, a wild, high laugh. “To see if the dead can walk, babe,” he told her. “I want to see if the dead can walk.”